Photovoltaic module temperature profile for Malaysia

Many attentions have been driven to evaluate the behaviour of PV module temperature for higher latitude regions, but very few were conducted for lower latitude regions. Thus, this study investigates the temperature profile of cell-to-cell within a single module and analyse the temperature difference between open circuit and on load operating conditions. This study has been conducted at Green Energy Research Centre, Universiti Teknologi MARA Shah Alam, Malaysia. The data was collected and separated in two sections which are daytime data and night time data. The daytime data of cell-to-cell temperature difference within a module shows the centre cell to be warmer than the corner cells with RMS different of 0.77 oC. For nighttime data, the RMS different was found to be only 0.34 oC. On the other hand, in changing the modules operating conditions from open circuit to on load conditions has resulted in lowering the module temperature significantly.